Pi&#232ce de Résistance

There’s been much talk (including here) about Quentin Tarantino’s new film, “Inglourious Basterds,” a Second World War story in which a group of Jewish soldiers is organized into a platoon of vengeance against France’s German occupiers. It’s playing in competition at the Cannes Festival. But there’s another film, playing out of competition, on more or less the same subject, that looks to be as promising. The French director Robert Gu&#233diguian’s “L’Arm&#233 du Crime” (“The Army of Crime”) dramatizes the true story of the “Manouchian Group,” a band of fighters in the French resistance described, in the trailer below, as “Jews, Poles, Hungarians, and also Spanish and Italian Communists, all led by an Armenian.”

In a video interview posted today on the Le Figaro site, Gu&#233diguian (in his tangy Proven&#231al accent) admits his “mad pride to think that we’ll do an original film on this subject that is not at all similar to the others, and that may even be better.” The trailer below suggests something of what he’s after; there, you’ll hear the actor Simon Abkarian, as Manouchian, utter a line that resounds very personally for the director, whose father was Armenian: “Do you know what Hitler said? ‘Who remembers the Armenians today?’ Well, my family disappeared a long time ago.” (It’s worth remembering that Jean-Pierre Melville’s “Army of Shadows,” from 1969, which opened here only in 2006, elided both ethnicity and Communism.)

Gu&#233diguian, a marvelous filmmaker best known here for “Marius and Jeannette,” has been working assiduously of late; it’s his fifth new film since 2004, none of which has been distributed here (including the fascinating “The Last Mitterrand,” which played at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005); let’s hope we get to see “L’Arm&#233 du Crime” here soon.

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